Counting Cards in Blackjack

The concept behind blackjack card counting is that a deck with lots of 10’s and aces is beneficial to the player while a deck full of low cards is beneficial to the dealer. Knowing this your plan is to bet high when the deck favors the player and bet low when it favors the dealer. Please don’t try this unless you have a good understanding of basic blackjack strategy.

A deck of cards with lots of 10 valued cards will make a dealer bust far more then they would with a deck with many low cards. The reason for this is that you as the player can stand at any point in the game while the dealer must take a card until they hit a soft 17. So if the deck has lots of 10s and the dealer has a 5 to your 14 you probably would not hit as the plan is the dealer will bust. This is what gives the card counter an advantage over the dealer.

The trick is to count the cards and figure out when the deck is loaded and to adjust your play accordingly. A deck with lots of aces will increase the odds of blackjacks. At most casinos a blackjack pays players 3-2 but the dealer only win 1-1 off you if they hit it.

How do you card count in blackjack?

Well you don’t have to memorize every card in a 6 deck shoe; the standard shoe size for most casinos. What you do is you assign point values to individual cards as listed below.

2, 3, 4, 5, 6 = +1
7, 8, 9 = 0
10, J, Q, K, ACE = -1

As a card counter your job is to add the values of all the cards as they are dealt. This is known as the running count. Lets run through an example. So the cards get dealt around the table in this order. 6, ace, 9, 10, 10 which would put the running count at –2. If you stopped here it’s called a "Unbalanced card counting strategy". If you want to look into this more I suggest you consider a balanced card counting system.